Familiarity with a face strengthens identity adaptation aftereffects and increases the degree to which adaptation effects transfer across changes in view (Jiang et al., 2007). In the present study, we examine whether familiarity with an emotionally expressive face has a similar effect on emotion adaptation. Participants were familiarized with dynamic emotionally expressive faces. After familiarization, emotion adaptation effects were assessed for familiar and unfamiliar faces. In our study, familiarization was associated with a restriction in the range of values that produce a strong adaptation effect. More specifically, adaptation effects were weaker at intermediate morph levels for familiar faces than they were for unfamiliar faces. These findings suggests that adaptation effects can be used to study how perceptual mechanisms are fine tuned to recognize subtle emotional expressions.